On Being Excluded: Vegan Politics, Education & Personal Life.
19 December 2018 [link youtube]
Partly about the politics of veganism, but broadly dealing with a topic that's been a significant part of "the meaning of life" —or, at least, the meaning of my life. Struggles with being excluded from opportunities are inevitable: it really hurts me to hear the meaningful reasons for those exclusions reduced to meaningless ones.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this may seem like an unusual
philosophical caveat to open a video with but I'm opening this video by saying that if I use the word meaningful and I'm going to use the word meaningful many many times in this video when I use the word meaningful here I mean it in a very neutral descriptive sense I don't mean that something is good because it's meaningful in the sense that many people might say a work of art is a meaningful it says very positive connotations I'm gonna talk about exclusion and my long history of being excluded from things excluded from opportunities for what I would call meaningful reasons and it really does hurt me when people try to explain these experiences of had explained this big part of my life by trying to reduce the situation to meaningless reasons by trying to give reductionistic explanations for what's really happening here so a couple of examples I have the experience of being excluded from masters degree programs and PhD programs in Asian Studies academic study of politics and history of Asia and it's for meaningful reasons now why why do I say meaningful it's not because I'm ugly it's not because I have low grades it's not because of your circumstances it's not because I don't have enough money to UM you know access Asian Studies it's not because of some personal defective character on my part akin to having a stutter and I just say I'm someone who is very well-spoken I can present myself very well at job interviews and in meetings and in high-pressure situations you guys may have noticed they do a lot of talking here on YouTube and so I'm really especially aware of how people with a fairly minor defective character like having a stutter is not being able to speak well and convincingly I understand how that can impact their whole lives in these situations in a way that's meaningless a lot of Kree people you guys know I used to work with Korean Ojibwe people when I lived in Saskatchewan a lot of Cree people who have a traditional upbringing actually have mannerisms that really impede them this way during a job interview or when asked a difficult question being raised in their culture they may respond to being asked a question by looking down at the floor and remaining silent for several seconds I remember discussing this with a professor that culturally this was taken as a sign that you were taking the question seriously and really thinking about it but for most white Western English speaking people it seems dishonest and evasive you know why aren't you looking me in the eye why aren't you answering right away this kind of thing so there can be cultural barriers that also lead to people being excluded from opportunities in a way that's kind of meaningless but Asian Studies for example I have sent emails to and try to apply to the master's degrees in PhD programs in Asian Studies and I am often excluded because of how they define Asian Studies so I may write to a program and they write back to me it's better when they say this openly and honestly sometimes I find out it more indirectly and they say well their definition of Asian Studies is just the study of literature and poetry of refined culture in some cases they write back and say that they also do cinema in some cases they may be also do painting the arts indeed you can imagine just how much there is the the history of painting in China huge use to others but for the most part its literature and poetry and they write back and say look if you don't do a classical literature and poetry of China Japan maybe there are a couple other place in the list it's normally just China Japan then we aren't interested we don't want to work with you we don't want to supervise your research so it is very very hurtful to me when I explain to people what my situation is in a khadeem studies and they respond to that by trying to claim no no no there were plenty of opportunities few nation studies your problem is just your character that there's something abrasive or displeasing about you like having a stutter oh no no your problem is just how your resume is written like how your CV is worth it's something we ultimately meaningless if you're gonna know you just need to apply again and did you change your behavior in some trivial way that is really very hurtful to me and you know I asked myself this question sometimes why am I on YouTube at all if I can't come on and talk about my feelings this way I don't know what this video is gonna mean for other people I don't know what it would mean for my own daughter if she sees it someday but I can tell you this is really meaningful to me and I've fixed that word meaningful again oh you know I think there's something here in human nature that gets touched on or maybe it's just in in my nature in terms of my caring about honor and dignity and truth and justice you know the point here is not to claim that I am perfect and I'm blameless and how dare you blame me for something that somebody else's fault objectively speaking it's not necessarily a fault at all that this academic discipline Asian Studies defines what they do in the way that they do but I'm telling you look my experience of being excluded you know my native experience it's not meaningless and it's not trivial and it's not just me it's not it's not it's not something about my mannerisms and yeah it is very very hurtful for me to hear back that that that kind of comment I really feel how dare you how dare you trivialize this you know something that's obviously has really serious long-term implications for me and how dare you pin it on something you imagine about my character just casting aspersions on me and disregarding what the context of this is that not only explains you know a huge part of my life in my struggle but that also tells you something meaningful about the institutional and political context that we're all living in so to end on that first example of Asian Studies Yee what I'm asking you to understand if I'm if you're one of the people I'm discussing this way is not just hey look it's not that I have low grades it's not that I have a stutter it's not that I'm personally abrasive in interviews with professors and putting them off this way I want you to understand there were a lot of professors in academia who respond really negatively to my resume my CV because it has Buddhism in it some of them will respond and say oh we don't do Buddhist studies that's a different department go to the department of religion we just do Asian Studies and here's what we do find that there are people who respond negatively to the fact that politics is in my CV is in my resume and they say oh we do politics we just do literature and poetry there's another department go to the politics department don't talk to us you know so can weather this is objectively good or this is objectively bad as another issue but any men here's a huge one I'm an anti-communist I'm Pro democracy and anti-communism and there are professors of Asian Studies there are professors of Chinese Studies in the history of China who are members of the Communist Party who are sincerely pro-communist and some of those people are born and raised trainees or ethnic O'Jays and some of them are white people who converted to Chinese commies it became supporters of Chinese communism and I'm very familiar with that because my own parents were both white people who converted to Chinese communism became supporters of Mao Zedong and of communist extremism in general in their case they also supported Joseph Stalin that's that's kind of a story for another video so look the next two examples and another thing I could have run through pretty briefly in parallel this and this is why I was so upset by comments recently made by this guy named named David here on YouTube on patreon I understand why I've been excluded from opportunities in Buddhism and this came up in a video that was kind of upsetting and interesting to me I put up a video of my speaking to a professor of Buddhist studies and it was a really lousy university department boat of studies offering a master's degree and PhD and it's a video you can see here on YouTube am I talking to this professor and right at the beginning he says look why would you want this opportunity like our university is so humble are you sure you'd really want to do this this will be kind of terrible for your career and probably you don't learn very much being here and so on and you know the point at which that conversation really turns sour because it's quite positive and communicative and collaborative up to a point is when I start talking about bias or prejudice within Buddhist studies which is very real thing and that a lot of those biases and prejudices against me and then he immediately becomes very hostile and very defensive as if I'm accusing him of being a racist or something and the conversation falls apart it ends acrimoniously so this this doesn't just one parallel to the example I'm I'm giving you it's both parallel and intersects with this issue because this is an example of it what I was trying to explain to him is look I'm excluded from some departments of Buddhist studies because they're run by people who are devoted to Tibet Tibetan Buddhism Tibetan politics Tibetan history Tibetan language and I understand that look I understand I'm being excluded for a reason there are other departments of academic departments for Buddhist studies where everyone is devoted to Sanskrit Sanskrit as a language and then to some extent the history of politics of India etc and I'm excluded from that there were many departments of Buddhist studies that are primarily rooted in Japanese Buddhism and Japanese as language and Japanese politics so again the point is look this is a meaningful reason why I'm being excluded this is a meaningful reason well I don't have these opportunities that doesn't mean it's good that doesn't mean I agree with it but I can sympathize if I am a professor in this department if I'm a professor in the university and I've devoted my whole life to Japanese as a language I've devoted my whole life to Tibetan or Sanskrit or any of these examples I can understand why they would receive a CV they would receive a resume they would receive an application from someone like me and they would say look this guy has expertise in sri lanka Cambodia Laos Myanmar Yunnan we don't want it this guy has expertise in an area where we don't have expertise where we don't want to be challenged we don't want to think about these things and of course it's not just political it's not just linguistic there's also religion involved there is also deeply held personal beliefs they don't want their beliefs challenged but even if language were the only issue you must understand Cambodian is a completely alien language from Japanese Pali is a completely alien language from Tibetan so on and so forth so I can understand why I'm being excluded for those reasons and it really hurts me to have people say no this is just your fault this is just some defective character you have etc so my reason for making this video now is that I just had this interaction with a guy named David and he was writing to me and suggesting that I was being excluded from participating in other vegan political groups other vegan organizations and movements for a pretty meaningless reason or set of reasons he was suggesting that I was being excluded because the email I was writing to these people the emails that were saying were just not very good at introducing me or presenting my channel presenting what I what I had to offer anyway in reply at first I gave him an example of the actual emails that I that I do offer and you know I found his reply to that also quite hurtful in exactly this way I'm excluded from participating in most vegan groups for meaningful reasons so I'll give an example I'm a critic of animal sanctuaries several videos your search for sanctuary on this channel I talked about how much money and how much time and how much effort goes into keeping just one horse alive on a sanctuary you can devote your whole life and all your fundraising to just keeping one horse alive in a sanctuary and you have to shovel the horses poo and you have to provide it with at least a monthly visit from a vet and deworming services and so on and so forth and the outcome of this if you manage to keep a couple of horses and a couple of pigs is ultimately not very different from these animals being on a farm it's just a farm that goes on forever and ever as opposed to a farm that slaughters them it's a farm that continues now they die of relatively natural causes but this isn't even morally equivalent to a zoo and it's not equivalent to habitat conservation or putting these animals in a context where they can live a natural life or they can live a feral life or they can reproduce and hunt and forage and find their own food it is still keeping them in captivity it's keeping them in farm-like conditions it's just a farm that operates at a loss rather than for a profit now even if that were the only ethical issue and the only political issue that alienates me from other vegan groups it's a meaningful issue it explains why they don't want to work with me and in many cases why I don't want to work with them so yeah it is uniquely and deeply hurtful to me for me to hear back from other vegans like oh no no there were plenty of opportunities for you in veganism there are plenty of organizations or institutions you could work with there are plenty of vegan activist you work with you've just somehow got some trivial Flavel you've got something about you like a stutter that somehow is abrasive or hits rubs people the wrong way that it's somehow just petty circumstances that have resulted in you not being able to cooperate with these people productively no I think there are real reasons and meaningful reasons why I'm not a member of had a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals why I'm not a member of DXE direct action everywhere while I'm not a member of any of these other institutions and yes in many cases I exclude them I mean this is also true it's not even being mentioned of the academic situation the first two examples there are many cases where I'm turning them down or I'm excluding them and there are many cases where they're excluding me and for me at least maybe there's a broader moral to the story some of you guys can draw whether you're dealing with personal professional educational career aspirations or political aspirations and humanitarian aspirations I think it's really significant let's treat what's meaningful as meaningful and let's have the maturity and attachment to treat what's meaningless as meaningless
philosophical caveat to open a video with but I'm opening this video by saying that if I use the word meaningful and I'm going to use the word meaningful many many times in this video when I use the word meaningful here I mean it in a very neutral descriptive sense I don't mean that something is good because it's meaningful in the sense that many people might say a work of art is a meaningful it says very positive connotations I'm gonna talk about exclusion and my long history of being excluded from things excluded from opportunities for what I would call meaningful reasons and it really does hurt me when people try to explain these experiences of had explained this big part of my life by trying to reduce the situation to meaningless reasons by trying to give reductionistic explanations for what's really happening here so a couple of examples I have the experience of being excluded from masters degree programs and PhD programs in Asian Studies academic study of politics and history of Asia and it's for meaningful reasons now why why do I say meaningful it's not because I'm ugly it's not because I have low grades it's not because of your circumstances it's not because I don't have enough money to UM you know access Asian Studies it's not because of some personal defective character on my part akin to having a stutter and I just say I'm someone who is very well-spoken I can present myself very well at job interviews and in meetings and in high-pressure situations you guys may have noticed they do a lot of talking here on YouTube and so I'm really especially aware of how people with a fairly minor defective character like having a stutter is not being able to speak well and convincingly I understand how that can impact their whole lives in these situations in a way that's meaningless a lot of Kree people you guys know I used to work with Korean Ojibwe people when I lived in Saskatchewan a lot of Cree people who have a traditional upbringing actually have mannerisms that really impede them this way during a job interview or when asked a difficult question being raised in their culture they may respond to being asked a question by looking down at the floor and remaining silent for several seconds I remember discussing this with a professor that culturally this was taken as a sign that you were taking the question seriously and really thinking about it but for most white Western English speaking people it seems dishonest and evasive you know why aren't you looking me in the eye why aren't you answering right away this kind of thing so there can be cultural barriers that also lead to people being excluded from opportunities in a way that's kind of meaningless but Asian Studies for example I have sent emails to and try to apply to the master's degrees in PhD programs in Asian Studies and I am often excluded because of how they define Asian Studies so I may write to a program and they write back to me it's better when they say this openly and honestly sometimes I find out it more indirectly and they say well their definition of Asian Studies is just the study of literature and poetry of refined culture in some cases they write back and say that they also do cinema in some cases they may be also do painting the arts indeed you can imagine just how much there is the the history of painting in China huge use to others but for the most part its literature and poetry and they write back and say look if you don't do a classical literature and poetry of China Japan maybe there are a couple other place in the list it's normally just China Japan then we aren't interested we don't want to work with you we don't want to supervise your research so it is very very hurtful to me when I explain to people what my situation is in a khadeem studies and they respond to that by trying to claim no no no there were plenty of opportunities few nation studies your problem is just your character that there's something abrasive or displeasing about you like having a stutter oh no no your problem is just how your resume is written like how your CV is worth it's something we ultimately meaningless if you're gonna know you just need to apply again and did you change your behavior in some trivial way that is really very hurtful to me and you know I asked myself this question sometimes why am I on YouTube at all if I can't come on and talk about my feelings this way I don't know what this video is gonna mean for other people I don't know what it would mean for my own daughter if she sees it someday but I can tell you this is really meaningful to me and I've fixed that word meaningful again oh you know I think there's something here in human nature that gets touched on or maybe it's just in in my nature in terms of my caring about honor and dignity and truth and justice you know the point here is not to claim that I am perfect and I'm blameless and how dare you blame me for something that somebody else's fault objectively speaking it's not necessarily a fault at all that this academic discipline Asian Studies defines what they do in the way that they do but I'm telling you look my experience of being excluded you know my native experience it's not meaningless and it's not trivial and it's not just me it's not it's not it's not something about my mannerisms and yeah it is very very hurtful for me to hear back that that that kind of comment I really feel how dare you how dare you trivialize this you know something that's obviously has really serious long-term implications for me and how dare you pin it on something you imagine about my character just casting aspersions on me and disregarding what the context of this is that not only explains you know a huge part of my life in my struggle but that also tells you something meaningful about the institutional and political context that we're all living in so to end on that first example of Asian Studies Yee what I'm asking you to understand if I'm if you're one of the people I'm discussing this way is not just hey look it's not that I have low grades it's not that I have a stutter it's not that I'm personally abrasive in interviews with professors and putting them off this way I want you to understand there were a lot of professors in academia who respond really negatively to my resume my CV because it has Buddhism in it some of them will respond and say oh we don't do Buddhist studies that's a different department go to the department of religion we just do Asian Studies and here's what we do find that there are people who respond negatively to the fact that politics is in my CV is in my resume and they say oh we do politics we just do literature and poetry there's another department go to the politics department don't talk to us you know so can weather this is objectively good or this is objectively bad as another issue but any men here's a huge one I'm an anti-communist I'm Pro democracy and anti-communism and there are professors of Asian Studies there are professors of Chinese Studies in the history of China who are members of the Communist Party who are sincerely pro-communist and some of those people are born and raised trainees or ethnic O'Jays and some of them are white people who converted to Chinese commies it became supporters of Chinese communism and I'm very familiar with that because my own parents were both white people who converted to Chinese communism became supporters of Mao Zedong and of communist extremism in general in their case they also supported Joseph Stalin that's that's kind of a story for another video so look the next two examples and another thing I could have run through pretty briefly in parallel this and this is why I was so upset by comments recently made by this guy named named David here on YouTube on patreon I understand why I've been excluded from opportunities in Buddhism and this came up in a video that was kind of upsetting and interesting to me I put up a video of my speaking to a professor of Buddhist studies and it was a really lousy university department boat of studies offering a master's degree and PhD and it's a video you can see here on YouTube am I talking to this professor and right at the beginning he says look why would you want this opportunity like our university is so humble are you sure you'd really want to do this this will be kind of terrible for your career and probably you don't learn very much being here and so on and you know the point at which that conversation really turns sour because it's quite positive and communicative and collaborative up to a point is when I start talking about bias or prejudice within Buddhist studies which is very real thing and that a lot of those biases and prejudices against me and then he immediately becomes very hostile and very defensive as if I'm accusing him of being a racist or something and the conversation falls apart it ends acrimoniously so this this doesn't just one parallel to the example I'm I'm giving you it's both parallel and intersects with this issue because this is an example of it what I was trying to explain to him is look I'm excluded from some departments of Buddhist studies because they're run by people who are devoted to Tibet Tibetan Buddhism Tibetan politics Tibetan history Tibetan language and I understand that look I understand I'm being excluded for a reason there are other departments of academic departments for Buddhist studies where everyone is devoted to Sanskrit Sanskrit as a language and then to some extent the history of politics of India etc and I'm excluded from that there were many departments of Buddhist studies that are primarily rooted in Japanese Buddhism and Japanese as language and Japanese politics so again the point is look this is a meaningful reason why I'm being excluded this is a meaningful reason well I don't have these opportunities that doesn't mean it's good that doesn't mean I agree with it but I can sympathize if I am a professor in this department if I'm a professor in the university and I've devoted my whole life to Japanese as a language I've devoted my whole life to Tibetan or Sanskrit or any of these examples I can understand why they would receive a CV they would receive a resume they would receive an application from someone like me and they would say look this guy has expertise in sri lanka Cambodia Laos Myanmar Yunnan we don't want it this guy has expertise in an area where we don't have expertise where we don't want to be challenged we don't want to think about these things and of course it's not just political it's not just linguistic there's also religion involved there is also deeply held personal beliefs they don't want their beliefs challenged but even if language were the only issue you must understand Cambodian is a completely alien language from Japanese Pali is a completely alien language from Tibetan so on and so forth so I can understand why I'm being excluded for those reasons and it really hurts me to have people say no this is just your fault this is just some defective character you have etc so my reason for making this video now is that I just had this interaction with a guy named David and he was writing to me and suggesting that I was being excluded from participating in other vegan political groups other vegan organizations and movements for a pretty meaningless reason or set of reasons he was suggesting that I was being excluded because the email I was writing to these people the emails that were saying were just not very good at introducing me or presenting my channel presenting what I what I had to offer anyway in reply at first I gave him an example of the actual emails that I that I do offer and you know I found his reply to that also quite hurtful in exactly this way I'm excluded from participating in most vegan groups for meaningful reasons so I'll give an example I'm a critic of animal sanctuaries several videos your search for sanctuary on this channel I talked about how much money and how much time and how much effort goes into keeping just one horse alive on a sanctuary you can devote your whole life and all your fundraising to just keeping one horse alive in a sanctuary and you have to shovel the horses poo and you have to provide it with at least a monthly visit from a vet and deworming services and so on and so forth and the outcome of this if you manage to keep a couple of horses and a couple of pigs is ultimately not very different from these animals being on a farm it's just a farm that goes on forever and ever as opposed to a farm that slaughters them it's a farm that continues now they die of relatively natural causes but this isn't even morally equivalent to a zoo and it's not equivalent to habitat conservation or putting these animals in a context where they can live a natural life or they can live a feral life or they can reproduce and hunt and forage and find their own food it is still keeping them in captivity it's keeping them in farm-like conditions it's just a farm that operates at a loss rather than for a profit now even if that were the only ethical issue and the only political issue that alienates me from other vegan groups it's a meaningful issue it explains why they don't want to work with me and in many cases why I don't want to work with them so yeah it is uniquely and deeply hurtful to me for me to hear back from other vegans like oh no no there were plenty of opportunities for you in veganism there are plenty of organizations or institutions you could work with there are plenty of vegan activist you work with you've just somehow got some trivial Flavel you've got something about you like a stutter that somehow is abrasive or hits rubs people the wrong way that it's somehow just petty circumstances that have resulted in you not being able to cooperate with these people productively no I think there are real reasons and meaningful reasons why I'm not a member of had a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals why I'm not a member of DXE direct action everywhere while I'm not a member of any of these other institutions and yes in many cases I exclude them I mean this is also true it's not even being mentioned of the academic situation the first two examples there are many cases where I'm turning them down or I'm excluding them and there are many cases where they're excluding me and for me at least maybe there's a broader moral to the story some of you guys can draw whether you're dealing with personal professional educational career aspirations or political aspirations and humanitarian aspirations I think it's really significant let's treat what's meaningful as meaningful and let's have the maturity and attachment to treat what's meaningless as meaningless